Fixture Installation in Pownal, Maine

Pownal Homes and What They Need

Pownal is a small farming town with an old housing stock. Census estimates put the median build year at 1971, and roughly 31 percent of its approximately 740 homes were built before 1940, a high share for Cumberland County. Nearly nine in ten are detached single-family houses, and nine in ten households own their home. The pattern is older farmhouses strung along rural roads, with newer houses set into wooded lots, many around Bradbury Mountain State Park. Very few homes are seasonal. Old farmhouses bring their own jobs: fieldstone or rubble foundations, ells and barns added in stages, and heating plants that have been swapped several times over. Where radiators remain, servicing or replacing an older boiler is often the first decision a new Pownal owner faces.

Water Supply and Drains in Pownal

Pownal has no municipal water system on the Maine CDC list and no public sewer, so nearly every home runs on its own well and septic system. Some sit over sand-and-gravel deposits: the Harvey Brook aquifer that supplies Freeport's public wells extends west into Pownal, which is why both towns protect it with zoning. Most houses, though, draw from drilled bedrock wells, and Maine CDC estimates about one in ten Maine wells has too much arsenic; radon in water is also common in the state's bedrock. Testing every few years is the only way to know. A private well means a pump, pressure tank and treatment equipment all ahead of the water heater, and a tank water heater sized for well water lasts longer when iron and hardness are treated upstream.

Getting to Know Pownal